Much of this new technology lies in the telemetry arena, enabling the use of credit cards and closed payment systems, along with alarm management and dynamic scheduling applications.  While there is a significant upside to having telemetry in your machines, until now, once you choose a vendor for dynamic scheduling or alarm management, you’re effectively locked in.

The problem of being locked into one vendor with limited options has had some adverse effects on the effectiveness of telemetry in the vending community:

•    What happens when one vendor comes out with the feature of the year?  If you’re not with that vendor, before now, you would have been out of luck.
•    One telemetry provider offers cashless functionality and another has a dynamic scheduling application that meets your needs.  Earlier this year, one or the other but not both.
•    You purchase another operator’s business and acquire their telemetry solution, and hope they utilized the same telemetry provider.  Otherwise, the telemetry equipment wasn’t worth anything.

As you can see, this situation doesn’t benefit anyone — operators are unable to realize the full potential of telemetry equipment, and selection is limited due to the lack of interoperability between telemetry equipment.

In the early part of 2009, NAMA formed a committee to address this problem, and a significant number of telemetry providers stepped up to assist in development and become early adopters of the Vending Data Interchange (VDI) standards.  Through months of hard work by the members of the VDI committee, and a commitment to deliver a workable solution back to the industry by NAMA ’09, the NAMA VDI standards Version 1.0 is being released.

This standard will enable telemeters from different manufacturers to communicate with other service providers.  As an early adopter of the VDI specification, MEI will be able to integrate the RDP into other dynamic scheduling software, allowing our customers to take advantage of the MEI RDP, the combo bezel and cashless, while utilizing another dynamic scheduling application.

In order to remotely monitor 1 or more vending machines, you’ll need an MEI telemeter in each machine.  MEI is unique in only requiring 1 of the machines to use a cellular modem to call out with all the others networked to talk to the one machine calling out.  You can set the type of alarms you want to monitor and whether you want the machines to call out at a set time or as soon as an alarm is triggered.

Curbside Polling and Dynamic Scheduling represent two types of wireless data communication with vending machines. Curbside polling is based on local area network (LAN) wireless communication from a properly equipped vending machine to the delivery vehicle equipped with a compatible LAN radio in close proximity to each other (usually not more than a couple of hundred yards). The absence of “air time” charges with this type of communication protocol makes it a very attractive, cost effective way of getting the freshest data possible about the replenishment status of a vending machine prior to leaving the delivery vehicle.   

Dynamic Scheduling is based on wide area network (WAN) wireless communication with appropriately equipped vending machines and promises a significant change in the machine replenishment process. 

So incorporate into your sales and operations strategy the use of telemetry to not only save your business ‘green’ cash, but help differentiate your company as recognizing the importance of going ‘green’ for your customers.